ComputerNews: “When you’re the CEO of a company called Oracle Inc. you’re obliged to make
the occasional grandiose prediction. Back in 1996, Larry Ellison foresaw a future
in which millions of American homes would boast cheap, simple computer
devices that would sell for no more than a couple of hundred bucks and supplant
$2,000 dinosaurs running bloated software like Microsoft Windows.”

“Have we gotten the Unix GUI all wrong? Unix is more than anything else a big bag of tools for people to use to construct a
solution. Argue away that the GUI is part of that solution, and not part of the toolset. But I think we’re selling the gui short.

It seems to me like we could do a lot more to integrate the gui into standard Unix tools. For example, if I run tar inside X, then
tar ought to pop up a completion bar. Why not? Or tail –follow name=/var/log/maillog ought to tell me how many lines per
minute it’s scrolling past. Why not?” Read more at Advogato.

NandoTimes: “Uncovering confidential data, such as passwords and credit card numbers, on business and government leaders who attended an annual meeting in the Swiss Alps was easy, computer hackers were quoted as saying Sunday.”

Kuro5hin has an article detailing all you need to setup a sealed Linux box as a digital VCR.

– by Grant Gross –

Following a week of big announcements at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, the Linux community sank back to earth this week with news of layoffs at two major Linux distributors, SuSE and Turbolinux.

The news coming out of popular German distro SuSE was especially curious this week. At the same time that the company’s CTO was touting the company’s plan to become a “worldwide market leader,” the company decided to lay off three-quarters of its U.S. staff.

The only problem was that someone apparently forgot to tell the SuSE press relations people, and a company spokesman first denied the reports as “totally rubbish.”

The plot took another weird twist last in the week, when the president of SuSE’s U.S. division protested that he was misquoted in a LinuxGram story, which paraphrased him as saying “Linux as a business isn’t working out” and it’s been a “victim of hype and irrational expectations.” (Quotes are LinuxGram’s, not the SuSE dude’s.) SuSE ended its roller coaster week by saying the now-confirmed layoffs wouldn’t affect its commitment to the U.S. market.

Acquisition issues

Turbolinux’s layoffs were a bit less dramatic, unless you were one of the people getting the pink slips. On Friday, the company began laying off about a third of its staff of 120, as part of restructuring during its acquisition of LinuxCare. In addition, LinuxCare laid off about 10 percent of its staff, about 15 people.

On the flip side, Linux distro Caldera sweetened the pot in its acquisition of Santa Cruz Operation’s Unix products, agreeing to pay $31 million for an expanded group of products.

Takes one to know one

So maybe this isn’t news anymore. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as calling Linux “crummy” in an article this week. Still, he admitted Linux has become a competitor in some market niches. “In some markets, crummy has been OK,” he tells Fast Company magazine. Let’s admit this: Ballmer has to be the world’s greatest expert on crummy software. Meanwhile, Microsoft faced a mutiny in its Whistler beta newsgroups because of its Product Activation technology, with testers threatening to jump ship to Linux.

For those of you who weren’t impressed with Netscape 6.0, the 6.01 version is out, complete with “enhanced stability,” according to one report.

If you’re still hungering for LinuxWorld news, IDG News Service put together a “best of” article. A ZDNet column followed up the umpteen announcements from big companies by looking for evidence of Linux in big enterprises. The columnist didn’t find much.

New in NewsForge this week

Columnist Julie Bresnick talks with Linux kernel hacker Geert Uytterhoeven about his start in Open Source.

News editor Tina Gasperson finds that many Linux users are holding off on running the 2.4 kernel, at least for the moment.

Columnist Jack Bryar explores where the Linux revolution may next hit, the Third World.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

“
Probably every true geek has thought about it, but far fewer have actually taken the plunge. The stories of long hours, frustration, high cost, and the chance of ultimate failure can be rather daunting. But the siren song is loud and long, and eventually yours truly was seduced by the promise of possessing one of the world’s finest geek toys: a functioning Linux laptop!” The story of how one geek made his laptop a Linux laptop is on 32bitsonline.

It’s at LWN.net. “Nothing too radical,” he says.

John Gowin tells us about this: “The purpose of this editorial isn’t to incite a flame war between GNOME and KDE users. What I hope to accomplish here is the start of a serious dialogue about the need for a universal KDE install/upgrade service. Currently, there aren’t any companies working on this type of project that I’m aware of, but the open source community is also pretty quiet.
I realize that the quick response of many might be that this isn’t needed. That this is much ado about nothing. There are some distribution specific tools that can get the job done, so why worry.
What worries me is that the GNOME camp seems to be running with this concept at full throttle, and that the KDE competitive perspective is being lost.” Read the

article at LinuxOrbit.com.

CBS reported on Transmeta developments. After a brief discussion of stock performance, they enumerate companies using the processor in their products, and future plans for putting the power-efficient processor in some unexpected places.

“Summary: OpenSSH unauthorized remote forwarding vulnerability.
Date: 20010209. Affects: OpenSSH versions prior to 2.3.0. Updated Package: openssh-2.3.0p1-1” Full details on lwn.net.